Can natural language be reduced purely to syntax?
In general, symbolism is a way of creating a map between a relatively small collection of objects, called the signs, and a much larger collection, which are the objects found in human experience. The fact that the collection of signs is enormously smaller than the objects in experience is what makes symbolism useful. Signs serve as pointers or handles, reducing the complexity of experience so that it may be conveniently manipulated. Symbolism generally works so effectively that we tend to forget that experience is immensely richer than the collection of signs. This means in particular that language can never truly communicate experience, although we habitually fall into the lazy fallacy which implies that it can. This fallacy conceives of language as a conduit through which packets of experience can be transported and systematically unpacked at the receiving end. In fact, however, language can point only to experience that speakers already share.
